This little girl is working on her insect in a public program at Brooklyn Children’s Museum. As you can see, we cut egg cartons down to three-segment size (triple wide egg cartons divide perfectly). Each kid received the pre-segmented body, representing the head, thorax, and abdomen. To the head, she attached eyes and two antennas. Right now, she is painting her insect however she likes. The final step will be attaching 6 pipe cleaners for legs to the middle segment – the thorax. Pipe cleaners are ideal because they actually bend, just like the jointed legs of an insect. If you choose to attach wings, they would also go on the thorax. Finally, the egg carton is strong and tough enough to almost count as an exoskeleton.

Try it out in your classroom! We would love to see the bugs your students make – email them to us, gogreen@brooklynkids.org.